"They cheated. And that's my job!" said The Devil in Drag.
 

Green Sun

by Donna Lamb

Sophie Drake, the Devil in Drag, felt depressed. The picture of dejection, her shoulders slumped in her blue-green Paris original gown, her ankles turned under in their fashionable Italian pumps and she chewed on one of her elegant, New York manicured nails instead of the feast laid out in front of her.

Not even the excellent ribs from Mama Woods' Smoky Ribs and Chicken that Bill C. Bubb, her chauffeur, had fetched from South Chicago could cheer her up. Smelling the Delta-style sauce on tender Midwestern meat didn't even make her hungry. They sat on the concrete benches beside an abandoned Dairy Queen outside Perdition Falls, Wyoming. In one sort of record keeping, it had been almost two years since the debacle in Los Angeles, the cause of Sophie's depression. By another sort of reckoning, it had been No Time At All.

The demonic pair spoke mostly in the Dog Latin of Hell's Bad Catholics but, in English, the conversation went something like this:

"I lost the bet to that damnable clarence, Bill," she said, slumping across the stained and broken tiles. A clarence is hellish jargon for a low-ranking Guardian Angel.

"Too bad," her henchman said. Bubb tucked a white linen napkin he'd stolen from a London club into the bib of his denim overalls and pushed the straw hat back off his merely hypothetical forehead. Inserting a baby back rib into his froggy maw, he sucked the sweet-hot, juicy flesh down his gullet. Smiling like a trash compactor then, he crunched up the rib between his teeth and sucked the marrow out also before swallowing the splintery, pulpy, mass of bone. "R-r-ribs have r-r-roughage!" he announced in English since the joke would be meaningless in Latin, good or bad.

"I can tell you're all broken up by it," she said. She frowned at him, wrinkling her porcelain brow and squinting her turquoise eyes. She made a delicate moue with her blood-red mouth.

"Whajja bet?" Bubb asked, inhaling some Sour Milk and Carrot Slaw, one of Mama Woods' specialties.

"A thousand years of torment for that innocent Cinderella dweebette against a thousand years of granting wishes on Strangefellows Day," said Sophie. On Strangefellows Day, the third odd Thursday of any month, by previous arrangement Heaven had permitted the Devil in Drag to wander the Earth granting wishes, tempting souls and causing trouble.

"Sucker," said Bubb around an ear of buttered sweet corn. After gnawing off the kernels, he ate the cob, too. "That deck was stacked, Lady."

She nodded. "That's what rankles most, they cheated me. And that's my job!" She considered. "Cheating them, I mean."

Bill snickered, covering the sound of his amusement by shoveling in Louisiana barbecued beans with a mason's trowel. The little bits of mortar dislodged from his unusual tableware provided the demon with some not unpleasant alkaline crunchiness. "So now the clarence has to grant wishes?"

"No, you ignorant toadeater." And the bit of brisket Bubb had just picked up did, indeed, transform into a rather startled Bufo alvarius, the celebrated Colorado River Toad. Shrugging, the demonic driver popped the psychedelic amphibian into his mouth like a warty olive. "Well, he did grant one," Sophie admitted. "But the bet was, if I lost, I wouldn't grant any wishes on Strangefellows Day for a thousand years."

Bubb chewed twice, swallowed and burped up a Peter Max cartoon. "Starting when?" he asked, reaching for a drumstick.

"Starting...?" said Sophie. "Bill, you lovely old reprobate from the pit of Hell, I could kiss you!" The Queen of Air and Darkness ran her fingers through her long blond hair.

He considered, gnawing on the good but greasy chicken leg. "Wait'll the toad kicks in and you're on."